Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

Part 1 Marginalization and the Rhetorical ecology of Community College Latinos Though I believe that the site of the community college is one of the nation’s last hopes for a utopian system of equality, the reality is that most often it has adopted multiple practices of postcolonization that other state institutions have practiced for decades. One of these practices is the hidden and implicit labeling of Latinos as “other” for the college’s statistical means of reporting to the state. Lazaro Lima argues in his Latino Body that it was an early identification of Mexican Americans in an 1894 pseudo-ethnographic description that framed Mexicans as “other” because of physical markers, “savage” traditions, and so forth, that demarked these Americans as non-Americans. This otherness continues to this day, though now we must add the complications of limited education, literacy, class, language, and even the imagined reification of “documentation” to maintain this otherness. This weighs ...

Parce que le crayon sera toujours au dessus de la barbarie... The reality of the American academy is that the public institution creates so many meetings to justify itself, its bloated administrative bureaucracy, as well as meeting demands of the state's own bureaucracy that the central mission of learning-through-teaching is obscured. One can rationalize the necessity of learning objectives and accreditation, especially within the language of competition, standards, and other jargon, but ultimately the arguements end up in a cul-de-sac of ad absurdum  when the collaborative relationship between/with students and professors is erased. That's pretty much how my last week went. Part I and Part II of this mini-series. The Study of Literature as a Critical Thinking Dialog Irvin Peckham quotes Freire: “Finally, true dialogue cannot exist unless the dialoguers engage in critical thinking-thinking which discerns an indivisible solidarity between the world and the people a...

What Is the Relationship between Critical Literacy and Citizenship? Part I of this mini-series As I continue to draft the syllabus and calendar of my "Literature of Resistance" course for 2015 Spring, I ask myself what I want from the students -- not in the form of assessment material, not as quizzes and papers -- but what they will teach me about their own literacy in 2014 2015 from their life experiences. My students are among the people I respect most in this world -- honest, frank, true, loyal, friendly, scared, vulnerable, brave, and full of humor. These are people -- humans, adults -- I want to surround myself with in my life. Their experiences with literacy and citizenship are different than mine, and so they have much to teach me. I hope to present the entire course, then, as a form of critical literacy where we all learn from each other. It's my place to facilitate discussion and to teach writing strategies, but I expect to learn from their discussions and l...

Rambling, Part I I'm rereading Long's  Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics  and thinking about how the institution of the community college fails in its approach to literacy because of its allegiance to the state system and not to the community which it claims to serve. They make two claims, both which meet the cultural expectation that "education leads to success": Community colleges are inexpensive institutions that provide accredited courses which transfer to four year institutions; the assumption there that it's the four-year degree -- not the two-year degree or certification -- that fulfills the promise that a college education leads to success "Careers, not jobs." Here, the claim is that, instead of starting entry-level in retail or the service industry, with few skills to meet the demands of globalist corporate practices that hire and fire at will, the community college student will gain skills that prepare for long-term ...

Why Literature of Resistance? Or, Who's Afraid of Pol Pot? Next spring, I'll be teaching a course I'm calling "Literature of Resistance" I'll be collaborating in a literature criticism course where we'll examine fiction and non-fiction examples of resistance -- critiquing the social/cultural kairos in which the work was framed, the author's intentions (if available), the literary/rhetorical moves made, the audience's reception, and any short-term or long-term effects of the literature. Currently, the authors' list includes Acosta, Frankl, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Thoreau, James Baldwin, Frederick Douglas, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jefferson, King, Atwood, Mandela, Chavez, Chief Joseph, and Malcolm X. Those are on the tentative syllabus, though I intend to introduce each of these in the first week and have students choose which authors they are most interested in, then prioritize our syllabus based on those conversations. Further, I'll ...